Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (43 page)

Before the series against the Phillies, Clemente had called his friends Carolyn and Nevin Rauch in Kutztown and asked them to meet him in Philadelphia. When they arrived at the Pirates’ hotel, they realized that they had not made reservations, but Clemente insisted that they stay in his suite with him. “
We stayed and we talked and talked and talked,” Carolyn Rauch said later. “And then he stood up, and we were getting ready to go to the game, and he said, ‘I want to talk to you, Carolina.’ You never knew what to expect next. He said, ‘I want you and your family to come to Puerto Rico for the [New Year’s] holidays.’ I thought, yeah, sure, we can make it. Plenty of time to make arrangements. And he said, ‘But promise me right here, right now, that you will come and you will bring [daughters] Carol and Sharon.’”

Recalling the scene more than three decades later, Carolyn Rauch said she still got chills thinking about it. “I said, ‘Okay, Roberto, we will gladly come.’ He said, ‘I’m telling you why. I’m not going to be there. Something’s going to happen and I want you to be with my family.’”

At the ballpark that night, the Rauches asked themselves what he meant. Why did he want them to come to Puerto Rico if he wasn’t going to be there? What did he mean something was going to happen to him? Did he already know about a trip? Did it have to do with baseball?

Against the Phillies, Clemente rapped out two hits on September 26, two on September 27, and one the next day, reaching 2,999 hits after two at-bats, when Virdon pulled him so that he could reach the milestone before the hometown fans in Pittsburgh. What did three thousand hits mean to Clemente? “To get three thousand hits means
you’ve got to play a lot,” he told reporters in Philadelphia. “To me it means more. I know how I am and what I’ve been through. I don’t want to get three thousand hits to pound my chest and holler, ‘Hey, I got it!’ What it means is I didn’t fail with the ability I had. I’ve seen lots of players come and leave. Some failed because they didn’t have the ability. And some failed because they didn’t have the desire.”

•   •   •

For baseball games, a capacity crowd at Three Rivers Stadium was 47,971.
Barely half that many people came to the stadium on the night of September 29 to see Clemente seek his three-thousandth hit against the Mets and Tom Seaver. Clemente versus Seaver was an even match of two talented, intelligent, strong-willed players. Seaver was in awe of Clemente’s powerful hands and how he could stand there “far away from the plate, with that great big long bat, and those strong hands and control it like crazy, hitting pitches on the side of the plate.” There was one spot, outside at the knees, where Seaver thought Clemente was vulnerable. If you hit that spot, he would just look at the pitch and walk away. But if you missed it, the ball would go screaming to right.

The drama this time almost came to a quick and unsatisfactory close. Clemente strode to the plate in the first inning, acknowledged a standing ovation from the crowd, and then took a mighty cut at a Seaver fast ball. He barely topped the ball. This had happened before in Clemente’s career. Though this time the ball bounced a little higher and went a little further, the play was reminiscent of the dribbling hit between the mound and first in the eighth inning of game seven of the 1960 World Series, and the topper back to Mike Cuellar in the third game of the 1971 series. After the ball bounded high past Seaver, second baseman Ken Boswell moved over to make the play, but it skipped off his glove and Clemente reached first. The scoreboard light immediately flashed H for hit. A roar went up, and toilet paper streamers unfurled from the stands.

Would the quest for three thousand end with a meager infield hit? First baseman Ed Kranepool flipped the ball to the umpire, who handed it to first base coach Don Leppert, who patted Clemente on the rear. But in the press box, Luke Quay of the
McKeesport Daily
News,
the official scorer for the game, jumped up in alarm. The scoreboard had it wrong; he had not ruled it a hit. “Error, second baseman. Error, Boswell,” Quay announced on the press box microphone. The lights went off the H on the scoreboard and the E lit up for error. More toilet paper, followed by a round of boos. This was no day for hitting in any case. Seaver and Nelson Briles locked up in a pitcher’s duel, with Seaver prevailing 1–0, striking out thirteen and allowing only two hits, to Oliver and Hebner. Clemente had one other chance at a hit. Seaver came in with a slider low and away—the very pitch he had envisioned in his preseason pantomime—and Clemente sliced it deep down the line to right, but Rusty Staub had been playing him toward the line and made the play.

After the game, Clemente was at his most churlish, feeling wronged again. Even now, with another World Series championship ring and a milestone unavoidably within reach, anger could be the fuel that drove him, as Roy McHugh had earlier observed. But was he really peeved, or was it just a show? When Dick Young of the
New York Daily News
reached the Pirates locker room, Clemente was in the whirlpool, his neck sticking out of the water, a sardonic grin on his face. He said he was celebrating being robbed of his three-thousandth hit by “the assholes in the press box.”

So you think it was a hit? someone asked.

“Think? I know it was a hit. Everybody knew it was a hit.”

But Boswell himself said it was an error, Clemente was told.

“He’s full of shit. Anyway, I’m glad they didn’t call it a hit. They’ve been fucking me all my life, and this shows it.”

Then it was pointed out to Clemente that Luke Quay was the official scorer. Clemente liked Quay immensely and thought he had always been fair to him. So much for the they’re-out-to-get-me routine. Abruptly, Clemente’s mood changed. This was something that all the sportswriters had known about Clemente for years. He would erupt, but his anger would pass, and if he was proved to be wrong, he would apologize. When the postgame show was over he got a baseball and wrote on it . . .
It was a hit. No it was an error. No it was superman Luke Quay. To my friend Luke with best wishes, Roberto Clemente.

The next morning at eleven, fourteen-year-old Ann Ranalli and two
friends from St. Bernard’s parochial school in Mount Lebanon caught a streetcar into downtown Pittsburgh, got off near Grant Street, and walked over the bridge to Three Rivers Stadium. The girls carried brown paper bags of confetti they had created from strips of the
Pittsburgh Press
the night before. Ranalli loved baseball, and loved Clemente even more. There was something unusual about him, she thought. “He was quirky . . . He always seemed to be his own person, on and off the field.” She wanted to be there cheering him on when he got his three-thousandth hit. On this misty, overcast day, they entered the stadium and went up to the right-field bleachers to find seats. No problem. Ranalli was disappointed when she looked around and saw such a measly crowd. Where is everybody? she thought. How could you not be out here for this? The official attendance was 13,117. Clemente’s teammates were equally distraught to see the virtually empty stadium as they warmed up. But it was a college football Saturday. “Pittsburgh was such a football town, even with the good teams we had,” recalled Richie Hebner. “It was a shitty, overcast day. Saturday afternoon. Only thirteen thousand in the stands. There should have been more. Here a guy who had played there eighteen seasons. [But] college football was on TV, money was tight, steel mills struggling . . .”

Those who were at the stadium that day, like Ranalli and her friends, were mostly die-hard Clemente fans, including a few dozen who had flown up from Puerto Rico. From the moment Roberto emerged from the dugout, he was hailed with shouts and greetings, and his every move was tracked by Luis Ramos, a photographer for the San Juan newspaper,
El Nuevo Día.
Ramos later estimated that he took twenty-five rolls of 300 millimeter film on his Nikon camera with a 4.5 lens. “I had to shoot from a distance of a hundred feet,” he remembered. “Every time he picked up a bat, I shot. And I kept doing it when he was in the on-deck circle, in the dugout, when he was here, there, I didn’t miss a single step.” Up in the press box, along with the voice of Pittsburgh, Bob Prince, the game was being called for Puerto Rico by the Spanish-language broadcasters Felo Ramírez and Carlos DeJesus. It was Dock Ellis against the lefthander for the Mets, Jon Matlack, who after going 0–3 in a brief call-up the year before had blossomed in 1972 with fifteen wins. In the first inning, Chuck Goggin,
just called up from the minors to play second for the Pirates, got his first major league hit. Doug Harvey, the second base umpire, stopped the game and gave him the ball. One down, two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to go to match the great Clemente, Goggin would say later. At the rate he was going it would take three thousand years. No more magic that inning; Clemente struck out.

Ramírez, the Vin Scully of Latin broadcasters, was at the microphone when Clemente stepped to the plate for the second time. “The audience is concentrated on the
boricua
behind home plate,” Ramírez began.
Boricua
is how Puerto Ricans often identify themselves; it comes from the Taino Indian name for the island. “They are waiting for the pitch from Jon Matlack. The fourth inning, bottom of the fourth inning. And the windup and it’s a fastball strike. The pitch was at the knees. Matlack ready again. Clemente ready at the plate . . . as always, very far away from the plate. And the windup, bye bye, he throws.” Crack of the bat. Ramirez’s voice rises and soars with the flight of the ball. “A double for Roberto Clemente against the wall! No-no-no! No-no-no! A double for Roberto Clemente! Completely clean double against the wall. On the pitch from Jon Matlack. Ladies and gentlemen, the fans are going crazy here in Three Rivers Stadium! Everyone is on their feet. Great emotion. They are giving Roberto Clemente the ball. He takes off his hat. He greets the public and receives the congratulations of the shortstop, Jim Fregosi. By his action, the shortstop is greeting him as the best. The fans are on their feet. The enthusiasm is huge here in Three Rivers. We are seeing a historic event, a historic event in baseball.”

It was an outside curve going just where Matlack wanted it to go until Clemente thwacked it against the left-field wall. The umpires called time after the play to allow the scene to play out properly. In the excitement of the moment, Don Leppert, the first base coach, took out a package of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and was about to stuff a wad into his mouth when Clemente came over and gave him the ball. Leppert stuck the piece of history in his back pocket for safekeeping. In the dugout, looking out at the regal Clemente standing on second base, Al Oliver was overcome by emotion. “It gave me a serious charge to see a guy who I know, who didn’t get the credit he truly deserved, but
to see him standing on second base, it meant a lot to me as a young player coming up. And I will never forget how it made me think, you know, here’s a guy who’s taking care of himself, and I said, that will be a good goal for me. I felt better about it than he did. He seemed nonchalant.”

When the inning was over, Clemente walked slowly out to his position in right. Ramos followed him step by step with his zoom lens. In the right-field stands, Ann Ranalli was ecstatic. She had wanted her hero’s three-thousandth hit to be more than a dribbler, more than a single, and she got what she wanted—a line shot into the gap in left-center. Now, as Clemente moved in his easy, athletic gait toward them in right, Ranalli and her friends rushed down to the rail and threw their confetti. Some of it landed on the field. Nearby, some fans from Puerto Rico were cheering loudly. Facing the bleachers, with his back to the plate, Clemente doffed his cap and raised it high. Luis Ramos caught the moment forever, in what became the most famous picture he ever shot. From the back, No. 21, tipping his cap. Ramos thought Clemente was raising his hat to God. The Puerto Rican fans thought he was acknowledging their cheers. And Ann Ranalli felt certain that he was tipping his cap to his three fans from the eighth-grade class at St. Bernard’s. Over time it would seem that his gesture had a deeper meaning, that he was saying farewell.

•   •   •

Virdon sent in a replacement for Clemente the next inning and intended to rest him the final three games of the season, until the team’s director of press relations, Bill Guilfoile, discovered that with one more appearance Clemente could break Honus Wagner’s record for most games played by a Pirate. Clemente felt no urge to play; he wanted to rest for the divisional playoffs against the Cincinnati Reds, but in a late inning against the Cardinals on October 3, the second-to-last game of the season, Virdon sent Clemente out to right field for an inning, and the record was broken. He had played 2,433 games for the Pirates. Not bad for a hypochondriac, he would say.

All in all, it had been a rough year for Clemente. He had played only 102 games and hit .312, a figure that most players would envy but
that was subpar for him. His fielding was superior, as usual, good enough for him to win his twelfth straight Gold Glove. But his final push for three-thousand hits left him with little energy for the playoffs, and it showed early on against the emergent Reds of Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, and Tony Perez. He went zero for seven in the first two games, which the teams split, then heated up in the next two, with a double and home run, but could do nothing to change the course of the five-game series. After Bench tied the decisive fifth game with a home run in the ninth, the Pirates ended up losing 4–3 on a wild pitch by Bob Moose. In the clubhouse later, everyone seemed down, except Clemente. He gave a spirited speech about next year, then found Moose alone in a corner, slumped in despair. “Don’t worry about it anymore,” Clemente told him. “It’s gone. It’s gone.”

There had been talk when the playoffs ended that Clemente wanted to retire, but
the surest evidence that he intended to keep playing came from Rex Bradley, the bat expert at Hillerich & Bradsby. Bradley made the trip from Louisville to Cincinnati during the playoffs just to talk to Clemente about his bats. “He wanted a new model made,” Bradley recalled. It would be a refinement on the knobless Frenchy Uhalt bats Clemente had been using for years. The new model would be a C276, and Clemente wanted it heavier than ever, thirty-eight ounces. Bradley promised to make two bats right away and send them to Puerto Rico for testing during the winter. If Clemente liked them, he would order a few dozen.